The 17th annual Young Generation Technical and Leadership Conference (YGTLC), also known as Ygnite, continued its long-standing tradition virtually this year due to the pandemic. Despite the platform being online, the spirit of collaboration among Korean-Americans across different fields persisted to help each other break past personal goals, encourage one another to remain gritty, and develop their careers towards success with ambition ignited. Bright young professionals, graduate students, and undergraduate students from various cities across North America and Korea actively participated in sessions designed specifically for their topical interests, while also broadening their interests, skills, and careers. These workshops and sessions covered subjects such as state-of-the-art research projects, entrepreneurship, and leadership topics.
This year, we had a total of 150 attending participants. In total, we had 43% working professionals, 42% graduate students, and 15% undergraduates. The young generation participants ranged in age from 21 to 38 with the median age at 27 years old. Attendees also enjoyed a diversity of geography with 39% from the West Coast, 41% from the East Coast, 18% from the Midwest/Central, and 2% international. We also worked hard to spread the news to new participants so we could grow our network. Of the people who attended, 45% were first-time participants, and 55% were returning participants.
Plenary Speakers
The purpose of the Keynote sessions was to empower the participants by exposing them to well-established leaders that influence and impact the Korean-American community. Through engaging talks and Q&A sessions, the speakers were presented as role models for the participants. The speakers were carefully selected as personifications of this year’s theme of “Connecting Within, Connecting Across” demonstrated by their experiences and accomplishments in their respective fields; they had to persevere in different ways to succeed.
Kwang-Soo Kim, PhD, has over 30 years of experience investigating molecular and developmental neurobiology of the midbrain dopamine neuronal system in health and disease, focusing on elucidating the transcriptional mechanisms underlying development and maintenance of dopamine neurons. He is also investigating stem cell biology and has pioneered generating clinical grade human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to realize their potential for personalized cell therapy as well as for developing ideal platforms of disease mechanism studies and drug development using functional dopamine neurons.
He is currently focused on translating his neuroscience and stem cell research to potential therapeutic development for neurodegenerative brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease. His team recently obtained the first approval from FDA to treat a single Parkinson’s disease patient using the patient’s autologous iPSC-derived dopamine cells and has successfully pioneered the first-in-human clinical trial of autologous cell therapy for the first PD patient.
Participant Sessions
This year, the program team oversaw the participant-led program sessions, which included lecture sessions, moderated panels, lightning talk, YG session and 3-minute presentation. The live sessions included lecture, panel, while the pre-recorded included lightning talk, 3minute thesis and startup booth.
Lecture Sessions: Participants who presented through the lecture session avenue shared their research and works to Ygnite attendees. The lectures were divided into the following groupings that then comprised a total of three individual lecture sessions: Grouping A: Biomechanics, Biosynthesis, Engineering; Grouping B: Traffic Engineering, Covid 19, Diversity; Grouping C: Computer Technology, Physical Science, Finance. This year, the lecture sessions had three presenters, allowing for each presenter to share his/her work for 10 minutes and a group Q&A followed all the presentations.
Presenters ranged from undergraduate students sharing their research to professionals who shared about their careers and technology trends. Presenters were asked to submit their material prior to Ygnite for review by the program team to ensure that presentations had limited technical jargon that could distract and/or derail audience engagement. Moreover, presenters were judged by both the audience and two organizers who all received scorecards that were then normalized. Each presentation was judged based on quality of delivery, engagement of audience, as well as ability to answer questions. For each grouping, the top three lecturers were awarded a prize during the Award Ceremony Saturday night.
Moderated Panels: Ygnite hosted three moderated panels during the conference. These theme-based panel sessions focused on the active engagement between the participants and the panel speakers. During the application process, participants could request consideration to be a panelist for each of the moderated panels, submitting a bio as well as a paragraph on how their experiences were relevant to the panel theme. The purpose of these panels was to provide Ygnite attendees a wide diversity of not just panel topics but also a wide variety of voices and experiences within each panel. The themes were the following:
- Future of Data Science and its Impact on the Era of Big Data: What is Data Science? Data science blends various algorithms, machine learning, deep learning, and other mathematical/statistical models in order to find hidden patterns and features of big data. What technological advancement have data science provided to our daily life so far? What future impacts will we experience with the fast-paced changing nature of data science and its related fields? This is the place to take a step forward and discuss about the current and future impacts of data science.
- Pivoting One Position to Another: From our workplaces or physical location we are living, we may want to think about making changes due to a variety of reasons. As a young professional, you may have already experienced changing positions or relocations because of personal life and more. Therefore, we want to discuss what are the things that you look for in order to pivot from A to B. It could be a raise of payment, better work life balance, quality of life, or being closer with family. What do you consider when you pivot from one position to another? Please, feel free to come with your questions.
- Permanent Changes Pre- and Post-Covid: Work-from-home, social distancing and 5-people max gathering are unprecedented social protocols that have enormously changed our way of life. As the changes arose, we had to adapt ourselves to new rules from work and social life. Not to mention, our values of life have also changed drastically. How would it be different from pre to post covid? We would like to hear the experiences and perspectives from different fields of professional including physician, researcher and industry professional.
The panels themselves constituted of A) Panel speaker’s brief introduction of his/her background, B), panel speaker’s response to the designated theme/questions and C) anonymous or open Q&A style discussion, all facilitated by a moderator and technical support. This year, the moderators received training on how to facilitate these dialogues and were given questions should none arise from the audience.
3-min thesis Sessions: For this year, since the conference was held virtually, the usual poster presentation has changed to a 3-min thesis session. For 3-minute thesis, all the sessions were pre-recorded and uploaded to our virtual platform. The presentations ranged in many different topics such as Health and biomedical sciences, Physical sciences & engineering, IT & Software, and Fundamental Science. The participants were evaluated based on their capacity to effectively explain their study or topic to a non-specialist lay audience.
Lightning Talk: For lightning talk, all the sessions were pre-recorded and uploaded to our virtual platform. The presentations ranged in many different topics such as Health and biomedical sciences, Physical sciences & engineering, IT & Software, and Fundamental Science. The participants were evaluated based on their capacity to effectively explain their study or topic to a non-specialist lay audience.
Networking and New Programs
This year we used the online platform SpatialChat for all networking events.
Ice Breaker Session: We arranged groups of 3-4 participants, who expressed their interest in the networking program based on their registration survey responses. We also matched first-time attendees with returning attendees as a way to familiarize first-time attendees with the conference. The teams were encouraged to take group pictures based on themes using SpatialChat. Winners were voted on by the participants and the top two pictures were announced at Saturday’s closing ceremony.
Team Competition: The teams of 4-5 participants each participated in a Jeopardy-style trivia game on Korean and American culture topics. Winners were selected based on the number of points earned.
Sponsor-Exhibition Hall: This year, we created an exhibition hall in vFairs to highlight corporate sponsors. The exhibition hall was a special place on the platform that allowed corporate sponsors to set up booths and upload important files to introduce their organizations to the participants. Participants were able to freely visit the hall throughout the conference.
In addition to the generous support of our co-hosts Korean Federation of Science & Technology Societies (KOFST) and Korea-U.S. Sciences Cooperation Center (KUSCO), we had substantial donations from corporate and individual donors. The corporate sponsors included Innopolis, Kakao, More Labs, Seamor, UTS Cargo, KIC DC, and KITEE. Individual donors are Yun choe, John Lee, Jungsook Yang, Soobin Park, Yena Son, Jun Ha Park, Hyon Lee, Sungkyun Choi, Jina Cha, Seunghwan Lee, Carol Rim, Kevin Riutzel, Suah Nam, Jung Yeon Kim, Sung Jin Choi, Joosung Kim, Ahseon Park, Jina Lim, Weon Chung, and Soo Eung Lee, and 17 anonymous donors including Friends of Ygnite. Friends of Ygnite is a group of anonymous donors that was formed in 2016.
Raffles: This year, participants were able to earn raffle tickets throughout the conference based on their engagement and participation at the conference. At Saturday’s closing ceremony, we raffled the following items. Winners were selected using a random name generator. We also had a raffle for those participants that attended the plenary session for its entirety. Winners were selected using a random name generator. The winners were announced at the closing ceremony on Saturday. To encourage participants to complete the post-conference survey, we held a raffle. Winners were selected using a random name generator and were notified via email that they had won.
Startup Showcase
This is the second year of the Startup Showcase, which includes startup programs and the second annual Pitch Competition. Startup participants were required to submit a pitch deck to join the Star. tup Showcase and enjoy the full benefits of the entire program. This pitch deck also acted as the preliminary screen for the Pitch Competition. In addition, we partnered with several groups to further expand the reach and impact of the Pitch Competition and Startup Showcase and programs in general, including: INNOPOLIS, KITEE, KIC DC, Born to Global (B2G), and Pascal Capital (namely, Josh Lee).
Details of the Pitch Competition: The competition was one hour and five minutes long, with multiple judges from different ventures acting as judges. Pitch Competition contenders were competing for prizes of $3000 for first prize, and $1000 and $500 for second and third place, respectively. Nine total participants were selected to the competition, and each startup had four minutes total to pitch, with two minutes for Q&A. The final judges included those with extensive knowledge in the entrepreneur sphere: Bumsoo Kim, Kiha Lee, Jeffery Roh, Il Minn, Jinyong Oh, and Jung Moon.
Startup Program
This year, we expanded beyond the first annual Pitch Competition in Ygnite 2020 by standing up a Startup Program and providing more opportunities for young entrepreneurs to meet mentors and network with each other. In addition to carrying over the annual Pitch Competition from the previous year, we offered startup-specific workshops, panel sessions, dedicated networking and mentoring sessions. Furthermore, we included a new way for entrepreneurs to share their innovative ideas with participants in a virtual setting with one-minute overview videos of their startups.
Startup Workshops: There were a total of three startup workshops, with distinguished speakers including both early-stage entrepreneurs and executives in leadership roles at more established startups. The topics of the workshops were as follow:
- Presented by Ben Park, Founder and CEO of Fosmo Med — How Do You Find Your Market and What Do You Tell Them? The key to marketing any solution is understanding who your customer is and how to reach them. If you believe you can sell to large companies with your technology without understanding the market, it’s a recipe for failure. Understanding the market segmentation and what story to tell to those customers is essential in selling to the market. This session will discuss some of the things an early-stage startup company can execute to improve the odds of successful marketing.
- Presented by Dug Song, Co-Founder and General Manager of Duo Security — Building Culture by Design: Startups are risky and mostly fail. The best startups build and enable teams to safely, ethically, and confidently take risks in order to capture the opportunity. Join Dug Song, who co-founded Duo Security and led the company to its $2.35 billion acquisition by Cisco, as he shares his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned on how to build a successful startup culture. Dug will discuss what made Duo successful in its early years, and how attendees should think about their own entrepreneurial ambitions.
- Presented by Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox — How to Innovate and Lead Without Burning Out: Innovation is key to our business success. But how do we consistently innovate when we have so little time or inspiration, feel depleted and burnt out, and are uncertain about the future? These are the questions Monica H. Kang, Founder, and CEO of InnovatorsBox has been helping startups and Fortune 500 clients answer. During her session, Monica will share key frameworks and tools, and facilitate interactive breakout sessions to help you: strengthen your creativity and curiosity, manage your time and energy, and build a culture of innovation.
Startup Panel: Last year, there was immense interest in startup-related topics and discussions, so we introduced a startup-focused panel session with distinguished speakers. Not only was this an interactive session open to questions from the audience, but it was a networking session among participants and mentors. The theme of the session was: “It can be difficult to know what is the right choice when you’re first starting off as an entrepreneur, and the choices you make now can have an outsized impact on your startup down the line. Come participate and listen to a startup panel discussion where established and experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists discuss what they had wished they had done differently in the early-stages, and common problems or mistakes they see early-stage entrepreneurs make! These panelists will provide insight and guidance which you won’t want to miss.” Speakers included Yongbai Choi (Venture Capital at Vulcan Capital), Joshua Lee (Head of Discovery Fund at Pascal Capital), Baekkyoum Kim (Venture Investments at Hashed), and Jonathan Chen (Co-Founder of FiscalNote).
Networking Session: Many participants often expressed frustration at a lack of time to network with their startup peers and also with potential mentors. To address this need, we had a dedicated session for startup networking, which was extremely well-received by both participants and mentors. This allowed for informal discussions which were further extended to a more formal mentoring session that we provided during the startup programming.
Mentoring Session: The mentor session allowed startup participants to meet multiple VCs and established CEOs, in a “speed-dating” style format. The format allowed participants to lean on the years of experience from mentors and freely discuss their ideas or questions. Each startup participant was able to speak with two different mentors for 10-15 minutes. Mentees were selected from submitted materials including introduction videos and a pitch deck. A room moderator coordinated when to move to the next mentor.
INNOPOLIS – KSEA Collaboration Session: This session reviewed the recent collaboration activities between INNOPOLIS and KSEA to help Korean startups effectively enter the US market and discusses how we can enhance the effort to achieve tangible results. This session was open to all attendees as well as the startup founders from INNOPOLIS.
Workshop Speakers
Because this year was virtual, we extended our workshops to include various topics.
Workshops
- Presented by Jeremy Schifeling, principal product manager at Khan Academy — How To Use Linkedin To Land An Amazing Job. Jeremy Schifeling led education marketing at LinkedIn, so he saw first-hand how powerful a tool LinkedIn is for students and alumni going after the world’s most competitive jobs. He compiled all the most advanced techniques he learned inside LinkedIn to help Ygnite attendees do the same in their own careers. From understanding how recruiters use the platform to finding alumni referrals at just about any job in the world, attendees received a crash course in LinkedIn’s essential techniques.
- Presented by Allison Choi, HR business partner at the Movember Foundation, and Abraham Gin, CEO at Gin Consulting Group — The New Normal: Discovering Your Authentic Leadership Voice. This workshop was designed to significantly impact your life towards influence with personal and professional relationships. In this workshop, Allison and Abraham examined leadership communication and helped attendees to become more intentional in speaking with their “Signature leadership Voice”. Attendees were able to experience what it is like to be personally trained by professional coaches with certifications from GiANT, bringing a collective 25 years of transforming the lives of over 100 Asian American managers and executives. This included tailored programming to address the needs of today’s Asian American leadership.
- Presented by Cathlyn Choi, Co-owner and CEO at Carma Media Production — Recipe For Positive Thinking And Success For Your Health, Wealth And Happiness. In this workshop, Cathlyn Choi shared her powerful formula for self-improvement and how attendees can harness the powers of will and the mind to achieve mental happiness, business success and financial superiority. A seasoned entrepreneur, financial educator and media activist with over 30 years of startup, management and marketing background in the technology, media, hospitality and financial industries, Cathlyn shared her 13 principles behind her success of establishing 4 startups and over 500 international business deals in this powerful, fast paced and insightful workshop.
- Presented by Dave Park, Managing Director at Archegos Capital Management – Finance – A Simple Language You Can Learn. Finance/Accounting is a simple language you can learn that will be helpful today and in your future, (i.e. retirement, your family’s financial needs, supporting nonprofits, taxes, etc.). This session gave attendees a chance to learn more about the language of finance. The goal was to set a positive mindset/mental framework and encourage everyone to become more well-versed in this language. Finance is universal across all industries and important to know both in business and in your personal life.
Ygnite 2021 Awards
| Award | Winner |
| Best 3-Minute Thesis – 1st place | Chang Hyeon Lim |
| Best 3-Minute Thesis – 2nd | Jenna Park |
| Best Lecture – 1st place | Katherine Cho |
| Best Lecture – 2nd place | Edward Cho |
| Best Lecture – 3rd place | Sanghyun Nam |
| Best Lightning Talk – 1st place | Veronica JungYeon Kim |
| Best Lightning Talk – 2nd place | Peter Sohn |
| Startup Pitch – 1st place | SicPama |
| Startup Pitch – 2nd place | Coconut Silo |
| Startup Pitch – 3rd place | Petlab |
Conference Testimonials
Testimonial 1:
“I had doubts about the virtual conference, but spatial chat and well-organized workshops and panel discussions really made up of the great conference. Thank you so much for hosting and inviting me to the panel discussion!” -Young Professional
Testimonial 2:
“Since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve attended countless numbers of virtual conferences. By far, this has been the best online conference I attended! This wouldn’t be possible without dedication from the organizing team and support from KSEA.” – Graduate/Professional Student
Testimonial 3:
“The programs were well organized and I never left a session feeling unsatisfied with the quality of the invited presenters. There was even a point in the conference where I could not decide between two sessions, but by also logging in on my phone, I was able to “attend” both simultaneously! I was really excited about hearing about Spatial Chat being utilized for networking at the conference. And I was not disappointed. The ice breaking and networking games were well-designed to teach participants how to utilize the platform, and it really helped emulate the atmosphere of the interpersonal conversations that we would have had in an in-person Ygnite! Definitely the best virtual event I’ve experienced in my life. You know you did an Ygnite right when you feel that post-conference depression hit. Well done organizers! Thank you for your hard work despite the unfavorable conditions!”
Testimonial 4:
“I just wanted to say thank you to all the organizers for putting this conference together. I couldn’t attend many of the sessions due timezone issues, however, I enjoyed the ones I attended. I am grateful to have had this opportunity to attend Ygnite and to have met up virtually with some old friends. I definitely want to apply as an organizer for Ygnite 2022. Thank you!”
KSEA e-Letters 